It is widely known that early career teachers experience problems caused by the gap between the focus on theory in teacher education and the practical orientation at internship schools and in daily practice, in particular with respect to classroom management (CM) (Montague & Kwok, 2022).
In my PhD research, I focused on what student teachers’ CM learning processes emerge during their internship. I studied the CM learning process of 24 student teachers, who were in the final stage of their teacher education, by analysing their assignments and interviewing them as well as their school-based teacher educators. Furthermore, I created a reconstructive picture of the CM learning process, by asking student teachers to draw a line of their development of their CM learning process during the internship period and to place meaningful moments on it. Meaningful moments were experiences as planned or unplanned conversations with colleagues, peers or their pupils, lesson observations, and so forth.
One participant articulated a meaningful moment as:
‘My main struggle is consistent teacher behaviour. I really find it hard to act strict when I said I would be. What helped me mostly were the lessons I observed last week, as I saw the same pupils showing the same behaviour to my fellow colleagues, and understanding this was not personal to me. I also learned that my colleagues reacted strictly, but with humour. These insights helped me to be more relaxed about it and gave me strategies for what to do, what to say and how to act.’
